WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE: The Hidden History of Two World Wars, solid history of how women have always contributed everything they have

WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE: The Hidden History of Two World Wars
HELEN FRY
Yale University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the twentieth century onwards, women took on an extraordinary range of roles in intelligence, defying the conventions of their time. Across both world wars, far from being a small part of covert operations, they ran spy networks and escape lines, parachuted behind enemy lines and interrogated prisoners. And, back in Bletchley and Whitehall, women’s vital administrative work in MI offices kept the British war engine running.

In this major, panoramic history, Helen Fry looks at the rich and varied work women undertook as civilians and in uniform. From spies in the Belgian network ‘La Dame Blanche’, knitting coded messages into jumpers, to those who interpreted aerial images and even ran entire sections, Fry shows just how crucial women were in the intelligence mission. Filled with hitherto unknown stories, Women in Intelligence places new research on record for the first time and showcases the inspirational contributions of these remarkable women.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Every machine has cogs. No machine moreso than the War Machine, and perhaps the total wars fought between 1914 and 1945 did more cog-making than any others in human history.

As men were perceived as more suitable to the killing parts of war than women, and as modern war is hugely more industrial than at any prior time, who did the admin? Who answered the phones, staffed the production lines, translated the intelligence intercepted in all the newfangled ways?

Women. Not that the men who mostly documented the wars, then wrote about the wars, ever gave them much credit for their work. Comme d'habitude. It does mean that there are tantalizing holes in the records. I hope generations of future scholars will feel the itch to fill them in.

This 2023 book set out to restore the women who worked in the ever-more-important field of military intelligence to their place in the historical record. Author Helen Fry had her finger on the pulse, a pulse that current powers-that-be are doing their best to still in every way possible. The crisis of the World Wars caused old attitudes about women, and society more broadly, to shift. These advances are what make the men (mostly, still men at the top) in charge so uneasy and eager to turn the clock back.

For my part I oppose this. After reading this chronicle of just how central women doing the work that needed doing, doing it well, and maintaining the everyday functioning of the world for the fighting men, you might just agree with me.

Reading the book is not always a joy...Author Fry's narrative voice is well-honed but not always euphonious in my reader's ear...but it's really the sources that let the reader down. Many aren't available, remaining "classified" for some variety of reason. Some were just never there in official records, needing tracking down and interpreting implied or obfuscated truths from elsewhere.

A fan of spy fiction would do well to look into how it was really done by those whose need of answers was pressing. A reader of women's history will find rabbit hole after rabbit hole. The resister of regression will find a pile of reasons not to give up, nor give in, to the regressive pressures on us all.

I want, perhaps naïvely, to believe there are enough of us unwilling to lose what we have all as a society gained to make that our reality.